Sunday, September 18, 2016

Witchcrap: The Shockingly Unspectacular “Blair Witch” Fails to Live Up to the Original

If there was ever
cinematic proof that you can’t capture lightning in a bottle
“Blair Witch” is all the proof you need. This third entry in a
series that many don’t quite care much about and made by people who
generally know what they’re doing, cannot even remotely match the
awesome power of 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project.” This new
take on the Blair Witch just doesn’t compare to the analogue scares
of the original. There’s nothing as scary in this highly digitized
world; the film should have been set right after the events of the
first movie. In fact, the only thing this new movie gets right is not
making any reference to the equally dreadful “Book of Shadows:
Blair Witch 2.”

Adam Wingard and his
screenwriting collaborator Simon Barrett are great filmmakers (Every
horror fan should see “You’re Next”). You can tell that they
loves to make their films into little homages and but with original
takes on familiar material. With “Blair Witch” it’s the first
time the duo has made a sequel to a film they previously had nothing
to do with. They seemed like the right guys for the job. Though, to
be honest, they were screwed from the very beginning. How does one
try to outdo the original? It’s so rarely accomplished well and
reinforces the fact that sequels or remakes made decades after the
original film are rarely successful.

The film follows
James (James Allen McCune) who thinks his sister Heather (from the first movie) could
still be alive in the woods where she disappeared nearly twenty years
earlier. He believes a video of a woman that was recently uploaded to
YouTube could be proof that she’s still alive. So he does what any
other wide-eyed young adult would do, he grabs a few friends, some cameras, and goes
into the same woods where his sister vanished in hopes of finding
her. And then things go (predictably) horribly wrong. One girl cuts
her foot almost immediately and if that isn’t enough for the whole
group to turn around and just go home I don’t know what is. Soon the
group gets turned around, the sun doesn’t seem to set anymore, and
some kind of loud monster keeps following them. At times the shaky footage
that makes up the movie feels more like “Cloverfield” than “The
Blair Witch Project.” Are they being chased by a T. Rex or what?

“Blair Witch” is
basically the louder, shakier, gorier, more digitized version of “The
Blair Witch Project” but not nearly as scary. Sure it’s true that
in the original film “not much happened” but the film was
dripping with dread and it had the guts to frighten you with screams,
darkness, and the unknown. Nothing this time feels remotely as
genuine. When a pile of rocks appears outside of Heather’s tent
it’s disturbing. When rocks appear outside the tents this time, it
feels forced. The original film could easily be mistaken for a snuff
film (many actually thought it was real at the time) and this one
feels unbelievably manufactured. I never believed that the characters
should have been filming what they were filming; and they were all rather dull and forgettable. To top it all off,
the movie’s conclusion is confusing and muddled and doesn’t
provide any answers, like the original, but I never felt betrayed by
the first film’s abrupt ending.

“Blair Witch” is
a disappointment of monstrous proportions. While I would never expect
it to top the original film, it fails as a sequel by not doing
anything remotely new or exciting with the already established story.
At least the second movie attempted to do something different, even
though it still failed. This third entry doesn’t provide any
answers to the mythology created in the first film and the two films
hardly even seem related save for a few creepy stick figures.
Consider it nothing more than a minor ding on Wingard and Barrett’s
career. But please put a fork in the found footage subgenre please,
because it’s been done to death yet again. GRADE: C

1 comment:

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About Me

"Hello, Clarice." Welcome to my film review blog. I've been reviewing theatrical movies since 2005. In addition to writing movie reviews (not to mention best of year lists, Oscar predictions, and other fun movie-related lists) I have had reviews and articles published on DarkHorizons.com and at WhatCulture.com. I've also achieved my longtime dream of appearing on RottenTomatoes.com. My favorite film genre is horror though I have rather eclectic cinematic tastes. I can easily go from watching artsy stuff like Under the Skin to stupid action stuff like Transformers (but please dear lord make them stop). I also enjoy running, cooking, and eating the spiciest foods I can find.